HLASM Language Reference

Character Set
Chapter 2. Coding and Structure
This chapter provides information about assembler language coding conventions
and assembler language structure.
Character Set
High Level Assembler provides support for both standard single-byte characters
and double-byte characters.
Standard Character Set
| The standard (default) character set used by High Level Assembler is a subset of
the EBCDIC character set. This subset consists of letters of the alphabet, national
characters, the underscore character, digits, and special characters. The complete
set of characters that make up the standard assembler language character set is
shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Standard Character Set
Alphabetic characters
Digits 0 through 9
Special characters
a through z
A through Z
national characters @, $, and #
underscore character _
+ - , = . ( ) ' / &
space
For a description of the binary and hexadecimal representations of the characters
that make up the standard character set, see Appendix D, “Standard Character Set
Code Table” on page 421.
When you code terms and expressions (see “Terms, Literals, and Expressions” on
page 28) in assembler language statements, you can only use the set of
characters described above. However, when you code remarks, comments or
character strings between paired single quotation marks, you can use any character
in the EBCDIC character set.
The term alphanumeric characters includes both alphabetic characters and digits,
but not special characters. Normally, you would use strings of alphanumeric
characters to represent terms, and special characters as:
Arithmetic operators in expressions
Data or field delimiters
Indicators to the assembler for specific handling
Whenever a lowercase letter (a through z) is used, the assembler considers it to be
identical to the corresponding uppercase character (A through Z), except when it is
used within a character string enclosed in single quotation marks, or within the
positional and keyword operands of macro instructions.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 1982, 2004 11